And the winner is ... dirty campaigning

Friday

Dec 7, 2012 at 12:01 AM

Sometime in the future, someone writing about the next four years in the U.S. will lead with: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” President Barack Obama has kept his boot on the throat of the U.S. economy for the past four years and now gets four more years to inflict the same destructive policies.

John FogleT-N Columnist

Sometime in the future, someone writing about the next four years in the U.S. will lead with: “It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times.” President Barack Obama has kept his boot on the throat of the U.S. economy for the past four years and now gets four more years to inflict the same destructive policies.Despite what pundits tell you, progressive ideology was not confirmed in the recent presidential election. Vicious negative campaigning and using shameful lies to denigrate one’s opponent were confirmed as winning campaign tactics — at least for Democrats.Eighty-five percent of the ads run in battleground states by the Obama campaign and the PACs supporting him were dishonest personal attacks against Mitt Romney. As a result, overall turnout for the 2012 election dropped by 7.9 million votes compared to 2008, indicating that many conservatives believed the malicious ads and chose not to vote.The problem for Republicans is that they cannot respond with the same level of nastiness. Since Republican voters have, on balance, more decency than Democrats, a Republican dirty campaign would create a backlash among fellow Republicans. Modern Democrats have much lower standards of decency — the dirtier the better — which is evidenced by the fact that the dishonest ads actually increased Democratic turnout.We watched Harry Reid, the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, stroll onto the floor of the Senate day after day and spew the outrageous lie that Mr. Romney had paid no taxes for 10 years. Whenever I see someone with a “Proud to be a Democrat” bumper sticker, I can’t help but wonder. Are you proud of that? No decent human being could be proud of Reid, and yet the other Senate Democrats elected him as their leader, another convincing indication of the lack of honor among Democrats.And that avenue is also off-limits to Republicans. If a Republican senator made up a despicable lie about the Democratic presidential candidate, Republican voters would react negatively, unlike the applause that Democrats gave to Reid. And Republican senators would boot him from his leadership role.A few days after the election, President Obama called a meeting of “the commission,” where bosses of major unions met in the White House. Also invited was the leader of the MoveOn extremist group. MoveOn produced an ad before the election that not only advocated violent riots if Romney won, it also called for direct physical violence against Romney if he won. The fact that the repugnant executive director of that organization was invited to the White House tells you all you need to know about Obama’s second term. We’re looking at extremism writ large.The Obama regulatory avalanche is going to plunge our economy into an even worse quagmire. If we’re very lucky, unemployment will limp along between 8 and 12 percent over the next four years, but it might get much worse.Prior to the election, many businesses were reluctant to lay off good employees, waiting and hoping for the economic boom that would have resulted from a Romney presidency. With that possibility gone, we will see large layoffs over the coming months. It’s much too long to list here, but you can count the day-by-day layoffs at www.dailyjobcuts.com. Scroll all the way back to Nov. 7 to get the full effect. The site includes some international layoffs, but most of the reported job losses are in the U.S.It’s futile to hope that Democrats will suddenly develop a sense of decency and oppose dirty campaigning — that ship has sailed. To return our nation to prosperity, we absolutely must formulate a response that helps Republicans and clear-thinking independents reject the outlandish lies.